Here’s an interesting article about public attitudes to science. The researchers at Yale were testing the effectiveness of what they thought was an unbiased informational presentation on nanotechnology. The subjects shown the presentation reacted in sharply different ways, with the division being on cultural grounds. However, the divide was not between religious people thinking that science was bad, and educated people prepared to give science a chance. Rather it was between people with right wing political views, who were keen on new technology creating economic growth, and people with left wing political views who automatically assumed that nanotechnology would be dangerous. So much for science fiction being a hot bed of liberalism, eh?
4 thoughts on “Evil Capitalist Science”
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It’s not precisely right-wing/left-wing, but individualist/egalitarian. If you want to get deeply into this subject, check out the Second National Culture and Risk Study, from the same people.
Well, if you want to spin things and use “egalitarian” in place of “people who want to tell everyone else what to do” and “people who believe that everything business does is bad”, then yes.
Sorry, mistype– the terms from their model are individualist and communitarian. (Egalitarian is used but on a different axis.) And… well, see page 2 of the study above for the full and proper definitions.
That’s more like it. Thanks.